


Their fathers' legacies

by lilyistryingherbest



Category: inspired by another AO3 work
Genre: Growing Up, Rape/Non-con Elements, anyway ceteiq I hope you like it I'm a big fan, blatant projecting, or don't I'll do what I like regardless, overly poetic descriptions of normal-ass things, rian has trauma but not much, this is the first fic I've posted in four years be nice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:14:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25175959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyistryingherbest/pseuds/lilyistryingherbest
Summary: I've been ardently reading the story And A Place to Rest Your Head by Ceteiq. This does not actually have any characters from The Witcher in it, instead focusing on the two original character children. This is a musing on how the kids turn out, and a short scene from their adulthood.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 94





	Their fathers' legacies

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [and a place to rest my head](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23097559) by [ceteiq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceteiq/pseuds/ceteiq). 



And they grew, as all children are want to do. Rian grew into a strong young man. He had his light brown skin, dark brown hair, and eyes like whiskey in sunlight. He looked like Jaskier—he had his papa’s build, lithe and quick as a cat, but had his dad’s ideals and held his legacy like a precious gem. And no matter what his fathers did, they could not shake him of his dream of traveling the land and saving people. From the age of 7 onwards, he asked, demanded, and cajoled Geralt into teaching him swordplay. Aleks made the pair a couple of wooden swords with the same heft and balance of real swords but with blunted edges. It took years for them to actually spar—Geralt was a master at evading, at going over and over how to hold the sword, how to strike without the boy actually learning how to defend himself. Rian would swing, and his father would block, would parry, would never strike back, like Rian was fragile, like he was still the starving child he was years ago. 

On his thirteenth birthday, he presented as an omega. Obviously, his parents didn’t love him any less for it, but Jaskier did cry. He cried because he was happy, he cried because he was sad, because Rian wouldn’t have to suffer like he did at age 13, but he did have a knock against him in the wider world. Rian didn’t like when papa cried—he couldn’t remember most of his infancy, but the sight of his father’s crying dug up a feeling of panic that didn’t often arise in him, and a panic that he never quite learned to quell.

By then, he knew what had happened to his papa in his youth, and swore to never let that violence be repeated on himself, so his fathers needn’t worry. That evening, he took out his practice sword and dragged Geralt outside with him. 

He tossed Geralt’s sword to him and told his father to strike him. 

Geralt’s stoic face went through a range of emotions, imperceptible to all but his family members—surprise, resentment, a scowl, and then a look of resignation. “No.”

“Dad, you have to. I’m an omega, and Papa’s never gonna stop worrying if I can’t take care of myself.”

He was met with tense silence.

“Dad, I know you promised to never hurt me, but I’m not gonna get better unless I actually learn to fight. 

“Yes… yes, I realize.”

“I want to travel the world and help people, just like you do. I can’t do that unless I can fight—”

“I know that, but—” 

“Dad, I’m your son. Whatever you deal, I can take. I promise. I will tell you if I get hurt.”

The two looked at the other. They sized each other up, like Geralt did to some creature that had crossed his path, and Rian like he did to kids he tussled with in the town square. 

They stood for a moment, contemplating the other. Then, growing restless, Rian raised his sword and began swinging; Geralt parried as he always did, and after a few blows, he returned one. To the surprise of both, Rian blocked, and started returning. They continued sparring, Geralt returning a strike for every four Rian dealt, until finally the hilt of Geralts blade knocked Rian square in the chest and pushed him over. 

Rian looked up in shock, the wind knocked out of him, and stared wide-eyed at his dad. His father’s face was the same impassive glare he wore when he was fighting, but his eyes were a raging sea of worry and fear. Rian felt something twinge within him too; some deep feeling of fear and horror and hopelessness, of past pain at an ugly man’s cruel hands, buried beneath years. Geralt still stood over him, looking like he was about to lose the battle with his worries while Rian looked to lose his fight with his wild eyes and shallow breaths. So instead, Rian laughed. He laughed and stood up and took another playful swing at his dad, and so started the match anew. 

As he grew older and stronger, Geralt wouldn’t pull punches. By the time he was sixteen, Rian had traveled with his father to go on hunts with him. By the time he was nineteen, the two were evenly matched. Geralt could fight him like he would fight a mighty beast, and the match could stretch on and on, with no clear winner. Geralt would usually win out in the end, but Rian could and did best his father on a few occasions. And any man who could best a Witcher was a man worth contending with. 

Elodie was smaller. As a baby, she looked adorable, like a doll with big brown eyes and blond curls and a sweet smile. As she grew, she looked almost like Geralt’s biological daughter. As she had never known hunger or suffering like her brother, she was built like a witcher, broad shouldered and strong, her young rosy cheeks quickly turning to weathered skin through long hours outdoors. She turned out to be an alpha, and smelt of woodsmoke and cold water. She took after her papa in talent and her dad in deed.

She had a low alto voice that would ring and tell tale of her wanderings as her strong fingers expertly played the lute. She would sing her father’s songs, and then quickly turned to make her own. She found melodies the same way she found mountain streams; she would listen and persistently follow until she hit upon the fully formed song. 

She didn’t like swordplay or violence, not in the way her brother did. She was an expert tracker and woodsman, could always find what she sought. She had her longbow, and it was said she could shoot a rabbit from a half-mile away, and only used that her skill for hunting. She would sing as she explored. 

She was always desperate to go out into the world and would go out into the forest behind the town and spend hours exploring. She knew the forest like an old friend, although her parents didn’t appreciate that when she was younger. They first let her explore unsupervised when she was eleven, and almost immediately regretted it. She picked a direction and started walking and didn’t come back. As the afternoon stretched into dusk and she still hadn’t returned, Geralt mounted Roach and rode half the night, searching all the places children were known to get lost. As his lantern burned out, he returned to the house in a panic, only for her to already be inside, having returned a few hours after he left to find her. She looked quizzically at her dad. 

“You didn’t trust me to find my way home?”

Elodie grew up looking like a Witcher, quiet, impassive, strong, and every new person she met was astounded by how well she played and sang. For someone who spends most of her time alone in the woods, she could captivate an audience every bit as well as her papa. 

Rian grew up looking like Jaskier, which is to say, Rian was pretty. He looked like the men that women liked to court, and the heroes all the stories and songs were about. He could sing and keep time, but not in the way his sister could. But where she disliked the spotlight, he lived in it. He grew up confident and kind, and would tell anyone who asked about his adventures, entrancing crowds in taverns with his reenactments. He was pretty enough to attract a good amount of company, but also pretty enough that his papa worried about him. Whenever he left, he knew his papa was worried about him getting dragged off and raped constantly and had him taking scent suppressant whenever he went away. 

Which is why, as the children grew into youths into adults, they traveled together. Rian would take contracts, and to quell their fathers’ worries, Elodie would travel with him, as she was all too pleased to explore the surrounding countryside. 

The siblings were traveling one night, stopping in late at an inn a week’s ride from home. Elodie was tracking a monstrous boar that traveled in nearby swamps and Rian had been sent to dispatch it. 

The two were sitting in a corner sharing a meal that they had earned together. It was a backwater town, couldn’t be more than a few hundred people, and the taverngoers were starved for entertainment. Elodie had played her lute from her secluded corner and sang a melody she had learned on her travels, something in a foreign dialect that swelled and grew with every refrain and quietly enraptured everyone who heard, and Rian had followed her act by standing on a table and regaling the patrons with the tale about the son of a Witcher who slew a harpy in the woods east of here.

The two were sitting and eating a meal when an alpha man who smelled like tanned hides and rotten ale came up to them. 

“Hey, you!” said the man, the words slurred and throaty. 

Elodie blinked at him, unamused. 

“You’re traveling with a pretty pet,” he continued, unperturbed. “He’s got a nice mouth for telling that story of his. How much for an evening with him?”

Ellie raised her mead to her lips. Over the rim of the cup, the siblings exchanged a glance. Rian responded with a near imperceptible nod, and then, just as subtly, shifted his body to look more demure, more delicate. 

“Two hundred,” she responded, not taking her eyes off her meal. 

“Two hundred? You gotta be fucking kidding me!” 

“Take it or leave it. You won’t find another omega as pretty this side of the mountains though. One night offer.” 

He considered. “One fifty. I make it a point of pride to get with every unbonded omega that comes through this godforsaken town, but I’m not paying more than that.”

“I think you’re undervaluing his worth. There are others in this tavern that would pay two hundred without complaint.”

The man regarded Rian again, his soft face that looked like their papa’s, his eyes that wouldn’t meet his, like a scared young boy telling grand tales for his dinner. A quiet performance, as beautiful as a peacock and as subtle as a sparrow. 

“One eighty.”

She sighed. “Fine.” 

The man put the money on the rough wooden table between them. Elodie scooped it up, as the man grabbed Rian and pulled him up. Rian made a small sound of indignation as the man pulled him up the stairs. Just before the two disappeared out of sight, Rian turned back and winked at his sister. Ellie raised her glass in salute.

The man took him down a hall and fumbled with the lock for a moment before forcing Rian into his room. He shoved Rian onto the bed, and he let himself fall, weak and malleable. The man crawled on top of him, kissing him roughly. 

Between the breaths and the kisses, Rian tried to push him off, and mumbled, “Please… stop, no! Please, don’t!”

The alpha laughed, taking his arm and pinning it down at his side. The other fumbled for his pants. 

“No! Stop right now, or I swear I’m gonna—”

“Gonna what, little one? I have you fair and square. I’m gonna fuck that pretty little face of yours, whether you like it or not, and—”

His words were cut off by the blade against his sternum. The dagger was pressed between the two men, hilt against Rian’s chest, point at the alpha’s. Rian’s pleas and begging were gone, replaced with a look like a man appraising a colt for sale at a fair. 

“Apologize.”

The man stammered. 

“Apologize”

“I—I’m sorry, please, I didn’t know that you, I didn’t—”

“Downstairs, you said that you had sex with every unbonded omega that came through here. How many was that?”

He tried to pull away, but Rian slipped his other hand out of the man’s grasp and held him firmly against the point of the blade. A drop of blood flowed down the blade and on to Rian’s hand. “I didn’t—I’m sorry, I—”

“Answer.”

“Five.”

“Hmm.” He paused. “How many were consensual?”

“I—please--.”

“How many?”

Quietly, “none.”

Rian felt scalding rage bubble under his skin. “And were you really gonna fuck me when I made it clear that I didn’t want it?”

The man’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to answer, then didn’t. The two hung in limbo for a moment. 

“Huh. All right.” 

And with that, he shoved the blade between the man’s ribs. He rolled the man off of him, yanked the blade out of him, and waited a minute until the twitching body stilled. He considered the rapist on the floor for a minute, before turning and rummaging through his items in the room. He took what he wanted, and gathered the man’s possessions of value, and left them in a satchel by the door with a note apologizing to the person who would find the body. He wrapped the corpse in the bloody sheet and left to find his sister. 

He could hear the music before he entered the room. Tonight, she played a meandering melody on her lute, a song of dying embers and waiting for sunrise, of the curiosity of what lies beyond the light of the campfire at night, singing under her breath to find the right words for the next verse. Rian’s foot creaked on the stairs, and she stopped. He knocked on the door, and it opened. 

“Big night?” Ellie asked as she let him inside. 

“Gods, he was terrible. He raped five people and would have added me to that too.” He pushed past her and set to scrubbing the blood off his chest with the basin in the corner. 

“Yeah, figures.” She took the kettle off the fire, and poured it into the basin to soak his bloodstained shirt. He used his fingernails to scrape off the drying blood, washed his face and chest with a rag. He pushed his shirt into the water, pressing it against the bottom of the basin until the water turned rust red. He paused. 

“Are we doing the right thing?”

“You know that’s a stupid question.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

Another pause. 

“What are you actually trying to ask?” 

“Do… do you think this is what our fathers wanted for us?”

Elodie considered for a moment, her strong hands tracing chords on her lute. “No.”

Her brothers face fell, just a little. 

“No,” she continued, “I don’t think our fathers wanted us to be traveling hunters or for us to kill horrible people. I don’t think our fathers wanted us to _be_ anything in particular. They wanted us to be fed and clothed, to have a roof in the winter and be able to defend ourselves if need be. I think our chosen path is more dangerous than what they would want, but they’re certainly not in a place to judge. At least, dad isn’t.”

“Then, do you think this is what our fathers want for us?”

“What does it matter? We only have to answer to ourselves at the end of the day. If killing monsters and cruel men is what you want to do—” 

“It is, I need to know I’m protecting people—“

“—then keep doing it. What our dads want doesn’t matter. You know better than most that the world is vile and awful and scary, so make your own meaning. If saving people is it, then do that. What our fathers want or have wanted doesn’t matter. “

He considered for a moment. “El… do you find what we do meaningful?”

She scoffed. “No, I just don’t think you can defend yourself from the big, scary alphas.”

“You’re the worst, you know that?”

“Yeah. Now shut up, I have a song to finish.”

“Yeah, fine. Goodnight, El.” 

“Goodnight Rian.”


End file.
